


'Things I've Seen...'

by Bluewolf458



Category: The Sentinel (TV)
Genre: Gen, Sentinel Thursday
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-02
Updated: 2020-09-02
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:14:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 699
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26248519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bluewolf458/pseuds/Bluewolf458
Summary: Blair and Jim have completely different ideas about keeping a diary
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4





	'Things I've Seen...'

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the SentinelThursday prompt journal/diary

'Things I've Seen...'

by Bluewolf

From the time he learned to write full sentences (even though initially they weren't always totally grammatical or properly spelled) Blair had kept a journal. His peripatetic mother had taken him to so many places during his short life; as he grew older, when he was four or five, he could remember some of the places he had been, some of the things he had seen, when he was just three, but he was aware that he had forgotten a lot and wished he had some way of remembering more of the things he had found interesting. Learning to write when he was nearly six, during one of Naomi's 'long enough to let Blair go to school' pauses in her travelling, gave him that way.

It wasn't easy finding space in his small pack for a notebook and pencil; he could only be grateful that Naomi was as happy to see him writing something as she had been when he taught himself to read a year or two earlier - happy enough that she put one or two of his things into her pack to make room for his 'things I've seen' notebook. He kept what he wrote fairly short, using them to remind him of the details of those things. And as he grew older, and the pack he carried (mainly for clothes and toiletries) got bigger, he also had more room in them for the notebooks in which he recorded the 'things I've seen'.

He knew Naomi wasn't too happy that he kept all those notebooks - once she had left somewhere, it was in the past, inconsequential, and if she ever visited it again she made new memories to replace the sometimes not very accurate memories of the past. But for Blair all the memories were valuable, and had to be accurate.

Even when he went to Rainier, Blair maintained the habit of writing something in his journal almost every day, though those entries were mainly references to some of the lectures; like most of his fellow students, he took detailed notes during the lectures, and he considered those as equivalent to journal entries. There was little that was actually new in his day to day life. He was too young to be accepted in the 'out of lesson hours' activities of his fellow students, so he spent his evenings studying, and knew that his academic career was benefitting because of it.

Once he had his Masters, and Eli Stoddard offered him (despite his youth) a position as his teaching assistant, Blair's journal entries increased in length. He still didn't have much of a social life, but he thought that having a record of student reception of his lectures could be useful.

Blair did well as a TA, and his lectures, young though he was, were well received; so when Stoddard left Rainier a couple of years later in favor of a life spent on expeditions, Professor Sydney was happy to accept Blair as his TA. And then Blair met Jim Ellison and his journal entries began to include more and more of the work he was doing as the 'observer' of a cop... while at the same time he started a new journal involving his work as guide to a sentinel.

***

Jim, on the other hand, had never developed the habit of keeping any kind of diary, except for the year his class had been told that their teacher, the following year, would be setting them an essay on 'what I did during my holidays'. He had decided that keeping a diary for that time would be helpful - and it was - but he found the actual keeping of the diary, writing in it every evening, was an unnessary chore.

Years later, as a cop, he realized that writing a report on a crime and what he was doing to solve it was, in many ways, akin to keeping a diary. But that was part of his job, not the unnecessary recording of what he was doing in his everyday life.

And nobody was more surprised than Jim when he realized that his views about that, and Blair's mother's views, were so similar.


End file.
